Although reducing the lease duration creates more DHCP-related network traffic, it increases the rate at which addresses are returned to the available address pool for reassignment. With an average volume of DHCP request traffic, Windows Server 2003 DHCP has a four-hour default grace period after which an expired lease can be reused. This means that an address is marked for deletion four hours after the lease expires, regardless of lease duration. When the volume of DHCP-related traffic is heavy and no leases are available to service lease requests, DHCP immediately instantiates a cleanup cycle, which reclaims any leases marked for deletion. By default, the cleanup cycle occurs every 60 minutes. You can adjust the duration of the default grace period after which an expired lease is marked for deletion by editing the following key in the registry: